Turkey Doing Test Runs of New Bullet Trains

December 20th, 2010 by Zachary Shahan

Turkey has had high-speed rail for a few years now. It received high-speed trains that can go up to 250 km/h (155 mph) from Spain in November of 2007. Turkish Railways (TCDD) was reportedly the 8th high-speed rail operator in the world (the 6th in Europe).

Now, Turkey has just tested out its first bullet trains, between the cities of Ankara and Konya. This inaugural run was on December 17 and was attended by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The bullet train test runs will end in summer 2011 and the new, super-fast trains will be officially launched then.

Photo Credit: TREND

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Tags: bullet trains, Turkey

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

http://www.hydrail.org Stan Thompson

(see this Hürriyet Daily News and Economic Report story on Türkiye as a potential hydrail leader: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=turkey-may-lead-global-hydrail-industry-2010-07-04 )

Türkiye is pursuing a truly vast track electrification program to enable a high-speed rail network. But I’ll predict that hydrail (fuel cell rail traction), which the US, Taiwan, Japan and China have demonstrated and/or deployed, will begin to supplant external power considerably before Türkiye’s network is completed.

Türkiye’s electrification is logical now because hydrail will come last to the highest powered rail applications–for the same scale reasons the Wright Brothers didn’t start with a DC3-sized plane.

But if a technology paradigm shift to onboard electric is coming (avoiding US$ 4- to 6-million per Km in construction), then engineering economics favors developing hydrail with all deliberate speed so as to minimize both the duration of the external power construction period and to avoid short amortization lives of the last lines to be electrified before wireless fuel cell high speed rail arrives.

As the Hürriyet article says, Türkiye is ideally suited to help lead the hydrail transition and has much to gain from doing so.

( see also: http://www.hydrail.org/summary6.php )